Tag Archives: Drudge

Drudgereport linked to a CBS Boston report on a Salem Patch story. AOL and HuffingtonPost did not. (Click for a closer view.)

It’s a “Hey, Martha!” story, a story that will make one person at the breakfast table yell out, “Hey, Martha, look at this.” It could go national or global.

If you work for a Gannett, a Scripps, a Patch, a Digital First Media newsroom or some other company with dozens or hundreds of websites, shouldn’t that be a simple matter of sharing with your colleagues?

How do you help your colleagues know about your great work, re-publish it themselves, or link to it?

Midday on Thursday, I noticed that AOL and HuffingtonPost were missing an opportunity to feature work by a Patch writer, a writer from a division of the same company.

One of the greatest connoisseurs of the “Hey, Martha” genre is Matt Drudge. Every day on Drudgereport.com he posts tightly written hedlines that link to big breaking news and political developments, but also a hedline or two pointing to bizarre, funny or just compelling “Hey, Martha” news. On two other sites, Fark.com and Reddit.com, readers submit similar posts. Fark editors pick articles to feature. The Reddit community votes for articles. In both cases, the homepages collect eye-grabbing links and can send tens of thousands of clicks to publishers. Fark and Reddit are not sites for readers who take offense readily or who take sarcasm or hyperbole as literal statements of truth. All three sites are good indicators of what stories are stirring conversation and drawing national audiences.

What interests me is the opportunity gap many publishers face, the gap between the national audience a publisher could collect for its own properties and the audience that it actually does collect. For awhile on Thursday, Drudge linked to a CBS Boston report based on a Salem Patch article (see screenshots). Let’s not debate the merits of the melted evidence story. Assume that a Drudge link, even one that’s up for a short time, is enough verification that this news has national appeal.

Why doesn’t the company that owns Patch, AOL, recognize the value that Drudge sees? Why doesn’t HuffingtonPost, an AOL division that links to almost anything hot, recognize and link to its own company’s original work?

Why does this happen more often than not at other large media chains? Gannett doesn’t have a big portal like AOL, but it does have USAToday.com and the websites of another 80 newspapers.

Does any of this matter? Is there something you and your company can do about it?

One proposal I’ve made in conversations starts with Twitter. A media company can decide that editors will use a special hashtag and tweet to notify partner sites about news that could be of compelling interest beyond one market. Editors who think they have something that can go big can tweet the hedline with a company hashtag (#LeeShr #GCIShr). Other editors could have Twitter search set to surface those hashtags and hedlines.